My thoughts on The Internet of Everything Technology, Travel Tech, Voice Over IP, Internet Based Communications and Video.

Posts from April 2016

The Comunicano Communique

This past week and weekend I was up in Seattle as part of my "see what's what where." While it's obvious that Seattle is growing and attracting more technology companies, and with each trip to the region I find that the city is vibrant with a younger and more sophisticated crowd. What I also observed:

A massive increase in homelessness on the street. It reminded me of SF in 2000 when I lived there for six months full time. This is going to impact the crime rate.

Uber drivers are almost all immigrants. While in SF, SD and LA I see more "locals" or college age drivers, up in Seattle not one was a local after four days of Ubering. Uber drivers in Seattle are totally GPS dependant unlike locals in L.A., SD who are savvy enough to take better routes.

Less old, more young. Wandering around, hitting cafe's and restaurants I found the age to be more 20's and 30s and less 40's and 50s.

If you thought Starbucks was the king of coffee, all one has to see is the number of new cafe's and roasters opening up. If anything Starbucks is causing a resurgence in cafe life, but by no means do they have a monopoly in their own backyard.

So read today's Comunicano Communique and get into the news.

By the way, don't miss the API event of the summer in Las Vegas. "All About The API"......

While the FBI keeps crying wolf about the dangerous dark future where criminals use technology that's impossible to spy on, the Pentagon's blue-sky research arm wants someone to create the ultimate hacker-proof messaging app.

Why Western Mass Doesn't Have the Internet

A new report about Western Mass's fiber fiasco sheds light on the national failure to provide high-speed digital access to rural America W elcome to Western Massachusetts: gently rolling hills, spreading trees, small and mid-size towns (many of them struggling), and adorable clusters of wood-frame houses pressing right up against the roads.

German carmakers Daimler and BMW have ended talks with Apple over a cooperation deal on an electric car, Handelsblatt has learned from industry sources. The U.S. tech firm is looking for a partner that could lend it expertise in manufacturing an electric "iCar." The favorite is believed to be Canadian-Austrian firm Magna.

Google is creating an in-house startup incubator to help keep its entrepreneurial talent closer to home, according to The Information . The incubator is called "Area 120" and will be headed up by Google executives Don Harrison and Bradley Horowitz, sources told The Information .

Is it telling that Google will be rolling out a beta of "a new travel assistant app" this week and that it will be certain members of its Local Guides program who will be among the first to get a "sneak peak?"

Google to Bring the Play Store to Chromebooks Everywhere?

When Google first embarked on their Chrome OS journey with the first Chromebooks, they intended for the system to be all about the browser, all the time. Since then of course, Chrome OS has gained a window manager, a competent file explorer and become its own Desktop OS in its own right.

AT&T, Otis partner on Internet of Things services

AT&T and Otis Elevator Company have announced a new partnership to bring Internet of Things (IoT) technology to city services and manufacturing. On Monday, the US telecommunications giant and Otis, a unit of United Technologies, said IoT technology will be used in city services such as elevators, escalators and moving walkway equipment.

When the ride-hailing services Uber and Lyft first came on the scene, business traveler managers were leery of the services. Are they safe? Are the drivers reliable? How you do you file expense reports for the rides?

Was Your Dog Walked? Your Phone Can Show You

Some parents find peace of mind in the location-tracking features in smartphones that let them keep tabs on their children. There are also the dog owners who can rest easy knowing that hired dog walkers are doing their job. And that the dogs are doing their business.

Screaming woman hints at the true potential of virtual reality

Virtual reality is a piece of tech that although drastically updated and re-introduced to the masses in 2016, probably won't take-off properly for another year or two. It faces a few issues that will take time to overcome, namely cost and experiences.

For a long time, the cost of a fast, high-end smartphone with the latest technology seemed definite. You were paying $600 or $700 no matter whether you did it up front or spread out over the course of a two-year carrier contract. This doesn't have to be the case today, however.

Why does it matter if a logo is memorable or not? According to a recent study from Siegel+Gale, logos that are memorable are 13% more likely to get the attention of consumers, and 7% more likely to make people want to learn more about the brand.

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Hotels install additional power outlets, once, and then as time goes on and many guests shove in oversized plugs or the outlets just get worn out your newer, slightly weightier iPhone/iPad charger no longer stay in the outlet?

Some Uber drivers cancel a ride more often after dropping off another passenger, after accepting your ride, when surge pricing goes into effect?

There's always someone in the TSA pre-check line ahead of you when you're in a rush and they don't belong there slowing down the whole system?

Your credit card company flags legitimate charges as suspected fraud but let's the true fraud slip by, and you have to deal with the aftermath due to their problem?

The Comunicano Communique

This week is best viewed as Facebook's Week. With their F8 conference they are setting things up for their next few years of growth. This basically means now that they have attracted enough of us to be regular "users" and we're "hooked" it's really time to make money. The two big themes coming out of the event are API's to work with Facebook and Live Video. Thus Facebook is really going after the ability to be present in your life all the time. The series of stories below are a nice primer, so I encourage you to look at what they are up to and draw your own conclusions so needless to say, "the Times, they are a changing.

So read today's Comunicano Communique and get into the news.

Yesterday on Business Rockstars with Ken Rutkowski, we talked about the cool apps, sites and tools to make you a better entrepreneur. The three you can watch from yesterday were:

F8 2016 kicked off today, with a packed house of more than 2,600 people and hundreds of thousands of people watching via Facebook Live. Mark Zuckerberg kicked the conference off with a keynote detailing Facebook's 10-year technology roadmap, and the ways those technologies will help bring people together and give everyone a voice.

Facebook Bets on a Bot Resurgence, Chattier Than Ever

To browse for a pair of brown loafers on Facebook Messenger, you can now text a message to the service to begin a conversation with the mobile shopping start-up Spring. Spring will ask you for a preferred price range for the shoes and show a smattering of what it thinks you might like.

Around 5 p.m. on April 1, everyone in our little office crowded around my desk, watching a live video of baby goats roaming inside BuzzFeed Motion Pictures president Ze Frank's office - a prank by staffers for his birthday. Would Frank be angry? Would the goats escape?? Would chaos ensue?!

Facebook just took video streaming on its Live platform beyond the mobile phone: CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced during his keynote at the company's f8 developer conference in San Francisco Wednesday that it is making its Live API publicly available. This will allow developers to integrate live streaming into third-party apps and devices.

Facebook has made a huge push into live broadcasting recently, including putting a new video discovery hub right in the center of its app. And now Facebook has its first official hardware partner for live video, and it's a nifty camera from industry pioneer Livestream.

Tomorrow, Facebook is expected to roll out new bot-related programming interfaces and possibly new chatbots of its own at its F8 developer conference. Microsoft recently used its own Build developer event to talk up our bot-centric future. In the couple of weeks since then, I've been watching recorded Build bot sessions and following various links to understand more about Microsoft's approach.

Whether it's reading more books, learning a new language or working out regularly, achieving your goals can be really hard. One day it's "I got called into a last-minute meeting." The next day it's "I have a friend in town." And before you know it, your goals are delayed or forgotten.

NEW YORK - About 39,000 Verizon landline and cable workers on the East Coast walked off the job Wednesday morning after little progress in negotiations since their contract expired nearly eight months ago.

Aspiring founders who think they've developed an amazing offering often believe that their product will sell themselves. While there are occasional instances of unique apps, software, hardware, and services that were so valuable that they instantly made their founders famous, this is rarely the case.

Nearly 20 percent of the U.S. population will have a disability during their lifetime, which can make it hard for them to access and interact with technology, and limits the opportunity that technology can bring.

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The Comunicano Communique

Today is a sad day in Philadelphia and all across the world of sports and philanthropy with the passing of an icon, Ed Snider. As someone who grew up in so many ways thanks to Mr. Snider, today is one sad day for just as it is for everyone who ever was a part of the very extended Snider/Flyers' family, but most of all for Ed's children whom I knew, grew up around and worked with.

Those who know me, know I grew up in sports from the age of 14, and so much that has followed was made possible because of Edward M. Snider. It was he who offered Ed Tepper, my first boss with the Philadelphia Wings their franchise. That was a startup pro lacrosse team in 1974. Yes, 1974, the year the Flyers won their first of two Stanley Cups. May 19th of that year is a day I will never, ever forget.

Two years later, in 1976, Ed Snider along with Aaron Siegel and the late Ken Genser started something called Hockey Central, which has now pretty much morphed into Snider Hockey and other youth hockey related activities the Flyers back.

Back in September of 1976, as a senior in high school, I was one of three founding employees who started Hockey Central before the first check was even in the bank. Less than two years later, while ending my freshman year in college, I was asked to run Hockey Central, being named as Executive Director, before eventually holding the title of President when I left to go west in 1988 and join the Coors Classic and eventually the Denver Nuggets. None of that could have happened if Ed Snider didn't buy into the vision of so many ideas and so much that was created that remains today.

Along the way I held a few other roles and positions within the Flyers organization, including Office Manager and Manager of Amateur Hockey Affairs, plus almost always being to go-to exec for Special Projects like Bobby Clarke's Retirement Night while Ed's son Jay was President of the Team.

But no matter who was at the helm, the Flyers were always Ed's team, just as Bobby Clarke was Ed's other son.

RIP Ed...RIP.

There's plenty of news in today's Comunicano Communique, so grab your coffee mug, tea or chai and get on with the news.

By the way, don't miss the API event of the summer in Las Vegas. "All About The API"......

APIs expose data for use by apps and the developers that create them. They make enterprise assets reachable by apps, and they're the tool that enterprises use to add a digital layer to their interactions with customers, employees and partners.

Unlimited data plans have been creeping back into the toolboxes of some mobile operators, though usually with more stringent fair usage terms than before as MNOs try to preserve their networks from overload. T-Mobile USA and Sprint both have unlimited options, and Verizon is poised to reintroduce them too - but only for Internet of Things customers, whose usage is less threatening to network capacity.

Verizon report paints confused picture of IoT targets

What we expected to see from Verizon's 'State of the Internet of Things 2016' market report, compiled by Oxford Economics, were some potentially insightful projections on the number of LTE devices, and perhaps even a brief mention about the US MNO's thoughts on LPWANs such as Sigfox and LoRa.

" optimistic-people-have-one-thing-common-always-late." Intriguing. Nothing's better than the headline: "The reason people are [bad quality that describes you] is actually because they're [good quality]." I got to reading. And as it turns out, according to the article, late people are actually the best people ever.They're optimistic and hopeful: "People who are continuously late are actually just more optimistic.

An hour's drive from Wichita, Kansas, in a little town called Potwin, there is a 360-acre piece of land with a very big problem. The plot has been owned by the Vogelman family for more than a hundred years, though the current owner, Joyce Taylor née Vogelman, 82, now rents it out.

Market researcher Strategy Analytics said it expects global virtual reality headset revenues will reach $895 million in 2016. About 77 percent of that value will be accounted for by newly launched premium devices from Oculus, HTC, and Sony.

Brands as chatty friends: Are chatbots 'the beginning of a new Internet'?

Craving a taco for lunch? No need to go to your nearest Taco Bell or even download the app. You can just summon TacoBot on messaging platform Slack and even get recommendations while you place your order. Microsoft's recent chatbot PR disaster notwithstanding, brands are on the cusp of a bot explosion.

Chatbots are coming to digital marketing, and they're also shaking up the agency-brand relationship. Since it starting using Slack in April 2014, digital shop R/GA has gotten 1,500 of its 1,800 staffers across 15 offices on the project-management platform.

One day last fall, my colleague Miguel Morales received an email with a sign-off that was so strange, it has stuck in his mind for the last year. It came from Melissa Geisler, who works in digital sports programming and production at Yahoo. Below Geisler's title and above her cell [...]

Using technology to own the digital conversation has become the most important aspect of most hoteliers' jobs. It leads to increased direct engagement with guests, an influx of guest conversion from unknown OTA bookings to real known guests, and ultimately, an increase in future direct bookings.

As Apple's first truly new tablet in years, the iPad Pro is every bit the beast it was rumored to be. Built around a gorgeous 12.9-inch screen, it doesn't skimp on the pixels or the power. With its eye-popping 2732-by-2048 resolution and the cutting-edge A9X chip, the big iPad Pro drew a clear line in the sand between it and the Air.

We hope you are enjoying The Comunicano Daily. If you want to share it with friends, colleagues and co-workers, or even your wife, child or even someone you don't like, please do. They can join by visiting The Comunicano Daily signup page: http://eepurl.com/BFXkD

The Comunicano Communique

Good Morning. It's Friday and it's been a busy week. Our big client news was YipTV joining T-Mobile's BingeOn. For the New Jersey based company this is a major milestone and likely a harbinger of things to come......The news cycle this week has also been fast and furious as next week tax day looms on April 15th, so it "usually" slows down. We'll see.

What company is hot? Facebook. Why? Start with pal Stephan Rust's blog post from last Thursday and then read the following few stories about the social network giant and I think you'll agree that we all can begin to drop "social" from the description of Facebook. They are really cresting into an all everything company.

Then there's the "let's buy Yahoo" news. I bet shareholders are wishing they took Steve Ballmer's offer a few years ago now.....What is it about Pigs and Hogs? Of courseencrypted communications remains in the news. What'sApp did it this week (read what the EFF has to say). Signal is available to more now via the desktop (as announced on their blog). The Amazon Echo remains the hottest product on the market ,and as I have all three, I can say that first hand, having been a user and raving fan since the Beta over a year ago. Talk about a daily experience changer, the Echo is just that, all of which rolls nicely into the talk about Bots...yes Bots. Not Bats..

There's all that and more in today's Comunicano Communique, so grab your coffee mug, tea or chai and get on with the news.

By the way, don't miss the API event of the summer in Las Vegas. "All About The API"......

After digesting some of the insights from Barcelona during Mobile World Congress, it's becoming more and more apparent that Facebook, not Apple or Google, nor Ericsson or Cisco, and especially not Vodafone or China Mobile, is leading change in mobile.

Becoming friends with someone on Facebook Messenger just became a lot easier. In a new update that started to roll out Thursday, Facebook's chat app now has Messenger Codes - circular patterns around a user's profile photo, which can be scanned to start a chat with that person.

Facebook Messenger will soon have more bots. According to a leaked slide deck, the company will announce a bot platform for its chat service at next week's F8 conference. According to TechCrunch, Facebook is seeding APIs to developers that allow them to build bots for Messenger and Web plugins for Live Chat.

There's a question I've been asking founders when they pitch me their bots: "Why is this a bot and not an app or a website?" I've been fascinated by the explosion of developer interest and startup activity around chatbots and am pretty bullish on their potential as both a user and an investor, but it's important to take a step back and think about why we're all so focused on conversational interfaces.

Video game Olympics announced for Rio

A new eGames international gaming tournament will make its debut in Rio during this summer's Olympic Games. The event, launched as part of this week's London Games Festival, offers medals and national pride rather than cash prizes for the winners. The competition, backed by the UK government, will be run by the new International eGames Committee (IEGC).

Verizon Communications Inc. plans to make a first-round bid for Yahoo Inc.'s Web business next week, and is willing to acquire the company's Yahoo Japan Corp. stake to help sweeten the offer, according to people familiar with the matter. Google, the main division of Alphabet Inc., is also considering bidding for Yahoo's core business, a separate person said.

Is That Email Really From Your CEO?

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) this week warned about a "dramatic" increase in so-called "CEO fraud," e-mail scams in which the attacker spoofs a message from the boss and tricks someone at the organization into wiring funds to the fraudsters.

Alexa, the ever-present voice control assistant living inside Amazon's Echo, Echo Dot and Tap products, has been a useful addition to the CNET Smart Home -- our spot in the Kentucky countryside for testing out all sorts of connected gadgets and gizmos (the Echo, Echo Dot and Tap included).

Amazon continues to increase the value of its Prime membership, this time expanding its network of free same-day delivery options for members. The retail giant announced today that same-day delivery options are available to Prime members in 11 new cities, bringing the service's footprint up to nearly 30 metro areas across the U.S.

Remember when, in October 2014, Reddit bought the unofficial Reddit mobile app Alien Blue? Even though the app was quickly relaunched, that was the first step towards Reddit launching its own official apps. That moment has finally arrived. On Thursday, the official Reddit apps landed on Android and iOS (iPhone only).

The desktop version of Edward Snowden's favored end-to-end messaging system, Signal, is now available to anyone who wants to check it out. Open Whisper Systems announced the desktop version back in December, but until today it was invite-only.

A week after the Model 3 unveiling, and Tesla is in the endzone doing a touchdown dance. A blog entry on the official Tesla blog boldly states that this past week was "The Week that Electric Vehicles Went Mainstream." Elon also couldn't contain himself and let the good news from the summary of reservations for the week overflow onto Twitter.

More than a quarter of San Francisco homes listed as vacation getaways on Airbnb violate the city's 90-day annual limit on such rentals, while the vast majority of Airbnb hosts have yet to register their properties, flouting a law enacted last year, according to a report released late Thursday by the San Francisco Budget and Legislative Analyst's Office.

YipTV Joins 'Binge On' Mix

YipTV said it has joined Binge On, T-Mobile's controversial optional service that delivers mobile video in 480p resolution and zero-rates the streams of its growing list of OTT partners. YipTV is a no-contract OTT-TV offering launched last May that's focused on Spanish-language video and features plans from more than 100 international and domestic live TV channels.

International-focused streaming service YipTV and OTT provider Dailymotion are among a block of over-the-top providers and TV networks that have signed on to T-Mobile's ( NYSE:TMUS) streaming service, Binge On, setting a challenge to its primary mobile-first video streaming challenger, Verizon's ( NYSE: VZ) Go90 service.

Like many companies, eBay is convinced virtual reality is the next big thing. But also like a lot of companies, eBay is trying to figure out just what that means for its business. On Thursday, the company is announcing its first small foray into the VR arena, as subsidiary StubHub offers Final Four ticket buyers the option to get an immersive, 3-D view of available seats.

At first blush, it appears to be an utterly unexceptional spiral-bound notebook. Manufactured in the U.S. by the National Blank Book Company of Holyoke, Massachusetts, it's got a light green cover and 80 sheets of narrow-ruled 8-by-10-inch paper. The first sign that its contents might matter is a request haphazardly rubber-stamped on the front: "RETURN TO REGIS McKENNA HIMSELF."

Back in the day, Rapportive was a great go to app to discover more about the person you were engaged in an email conversation. Then it was acquired by LinkedIn and its usefulness waned. Fortunately a new service has come out and it's awesome. I'm referring to Senders, which I talked about on Thursday's BusinessRockstars. Senders does for social and contact information what USA Today's bite size round-up stories did to the news. Makes it easy to know all you need to about someone in one place with their LinkedIn, Twitter, About, Angels List data and a quick search on Google all baked in.

Senders is still in beta, so expect a bug here or there, but after a day of using it, I can't live without it.

We hope you are enjoying The Comunicano Daily. If you want to share it with friends, colleagues and co-workers, or even your wife, child or even someone you don't like, please do. They can join by visiting The Comunicano Daily signup page: http://eepurl.com/BFXkD